Uncharted Waters

Sarah Waters is best known for her bodice-ripping lesbian Victorian novels - so it was something of a gamble when she decided to tackle life in wartime Britain. She talks to Lisa Allardice about her 'grisly' first attempts at writing, broadening her mother's mind, and her undying love for Doctor Who

Sarah Waters. 'I was interested in finding new stories to tell about people'. Photograph: PR/TimeWarner

It's just a hunch, but it's my bet that not many of the customers enjoying afternoon tea in the tented cafe at Hay are talking about dildoes and masturbation. I'm here, among the floating flower arrangements and floral wellies, with Sarah Waters, queen of what she herself has described as "lesbo Victorian romps". Waters is famous for sex. "It's barmy, isn't it?" she says. And, indeed, it is hard to square this petite, youthful woman (she will be 40 in July), with her blonde urchin crop and cherubic cheeks, with her racy reputation. "Most straight novels have tons of sex in them and it just blends in with the rest of it. People don't pick out those writers as sexy, do they?"

To a large extent, this saucy image stems from 2002, when Andrew Davies - the bad boy of period drama, whom Waters fondly describes as "an unapologetic dirty old man" - saw the potential to turn Tipping the Velvet, her first novel, into "absolutely filthy" TV. Davies' BBC adaptation introduced Waters to a much wider public, and an unsuspecting audience (including her own mother) to bodice-ripping displays of lesbian sex. "It got my mother using the word dildo, which I think has to be a bit of a victory," Waters says proudly. "She's not really a reader - TV is her thing. So once I'd been associated with TV, I'd made it on my mum's terms."

Waters has quite definitely "made it" on anybody's terms. In addition to Tipping the Velvet, which won a host of awards, her third novel, Fingersmith, was also adapted into a highly acclaimed television series, and was nominated for both the Booker and the Orange prizes in 2002. The following year she was included in the much-vaunted Granta list of best young British novelists. And her latest novel, The Night Watch, the stories of four intertwined lives during the London Blitz, is a daring departure that she has pulled off triumphantly. The Sunday Times rated it "her most compelling depiction yet of women's struggles for liberation" and in the Observer, Philip Hensher found it "a truthful and lovely book". It stands a good chance in this year's Orange prize, the winner of which will be announced next week, even among what is perhaps the strongest shortlist in the prize's history, including British big hitters Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel.

Waters is one of few contemporary writers who can genuinely be described as both huge critical and popular successes; chances are, someone in the past few months has urged you to read The Night Watch. The playwright David Hare, chatting in the green room before the interview, deemed it excellent; high praise indeed from a man who admits he doesn't always get on with the modern novel.

Despite this success, as one of her characters might remark, there's nothing fancy about Ms Waters: she cheerfully confesses to stealing much of her best stuff from other novelists, admits to being an ardent Doctor Who fan, and discusses Lost with an enthusiasm most authors reserve for Philip Roth. Her partner Lucy (hidden behind a battered PD James paperback at the next table throughout the interview) works as a sub on a TV listings magazine, which, Waters says, is very handy, as they "always know what's on the telly". Good TV, she says, can teach you a lot about storytelling.

So how did Waters come to be such a hit with everyone from Richard and Judy's Book Club to David Hare? Naturally, lashings of girl-on-girl action always helps, but as Waters points out, only Tipping the Velvet is really about sex: "I wanted to write a lesbian novel that was celebratory about lesbians." She is characteristically modest about her role as a poster girl for Sapphic literature - "It's a shame, isn't it? You'd have thought they might have found someone a bit more ... well, a bit more photogenic" - and insists that bringing lesbian fiction to the mainstream was never her intention. The implication in the often-made suggestion that, in choosing to set her lesbian novels in the safety of the past, she is sentimentalising the subject in sepia-tinted nostalgia horrifies her. She sees herself as a historical novelist first and a lesbian writer second. Waters has made the historical novel sexy, creating a brand of exuberant 19th-century lesbiana that, despite its dependence on pastiche, is all her own.

Swapping the dark excesses of Victorian London for the bleak austerity of Churchill's war-torn city was, therefore, a bold leap - and more difficult than she at first envisaged. "It seemed a bit risky, not so much in terms of the change of period itself, but the change of period made for a different feel of book. I'd almost thought I could import gothic style to the forties and I realised pretty quickly that I couldn't and didn't really want to." She had to find a new voice, not only for her characters, but for herself. Waters described these effects on her naturally lavish style as a drying-out and paring-down, with the result that "the lushness slipped away". Indeed, the prose in The Night Watch is as smooth and clear as a pair of nylon stockings - not that you will find many stockings in the novel; one of Waters' strengths is the way she lightly pins her novels with period detail (talc on the windows, gin gimlets), while avoiding the cliches of so much historical fiction.

In an extraordinary coincidence, she began work on The Night Watch on the morning of September 11 2001. "I was looking at pictures of the Blitz, images of people trapped in buildings, and I came out and there was another sort of blitz going on, and from that point on there seemed to be blitzes all over the world. I can't honestly say that I've brought any big musings on war to the novel. I didn't. I was much more interested in finding new stories to tell about the people who lived through it."

Although the most obvious, the change of period wasn't the only challenge. The pacy first-person narrative of her earlier work is replaced by an ensemble cast; the tight-laced plotting of the Victorian pastiche by a looser, character-based narrative; and as if this wasn't enough, she then chose to tell her story backwards, citing Harold Pinter's Betrayal as her template. The novel begins in 1947, as the characters pick their way through the rubble of their war-ruined lives, and works back to 1941 and the drama of the Blitz. A succession of love stories in reverse, the effect is a kind of emotional detective story - the clues are all there in the opening sections: a lost ring, a lost pair of pyjamas, symbols of the greater losses of passion, purpose and love. As one character, Kay, who prefers to go to the cinema halfway through a film, puts it, people's pasts are "so much more interesting than their futures". "It's terribly poignant," Waters says, "especially when you are talking about relationships, because you start off when it has all gone wrong and go back to when it was all going right."

Steeped in the melancholy fiction of the time, in particular Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, this is an altogether quieter, less playful novel than her previous work. But it is as much about plucky heroines overcoming adversity as any of her other novels, with the war providing women with opportunities to discover new identities, a liberation of which the lesbian relationships are only the most obvious. Almost all the characters are in some way extensions of herself, she says, with the exception of Viv, the one straight character, whom she found most difficult to write.

Apart from Fingersmith's Gentleman, The Night Watch features Waters' first substantial male character - Duncan, who is imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs - the writing of which raised its own sticky dilemmas. She recalls a recent conversation with a man who said he "really liked" the male masturbation scene, which takes place during an air-raid while the prisoners are locked in their cells, terrified. Waters says she had no idea if she got it right. "I was, like, 'Thank God for that!' "

The Night Watch took Waters a marathon four years to write, in contrast to the comfortable sprints of her other books. With a disarming lack of writerly mystique, she describes her writing process for her previous novels as "almost like painting by numbers - once I'd got the outline in place, it was then just a question of filling them in, which I remember as being relatively straightforward." But with The Night Watch, she felt she was "working in the dark, very, very close to what I was writing. Of all the novels, this took the most rewriting. I've got piles of abandoned sheets. That's probably how a lot of writers work, but for me it was very unnerving. I felt like I was floundering a lot of the time."

Waters turned to fiction while working on a PhD in gay and lesbian literature - "brilliant training for a writer", which gave her the discipline of research. She gave herself a year to write Tipping the Velvet. She describes her quest for a publisher - in which she tried everyone from small gay presses to Penguin Books - as "a wilderness period", although in fact it took a mere eight months, by which time she was halfway through her next novel, Affinity. During this time, she worked in a bookshop and then as a library assistant at Camden public library, staying on long after she had been published and even shelving her own books.

Her childhood, in Pembrokeshire, was "very ordinary, very traditional". A bookish child (although her biggest collection was Doctor Who annuals), she was "a horrible swot", and spent her spare time, when she wasn't watching TV, writing "Gothic stories of people meeting grisly ends and ghost stories with diabolical twists, all of which I'd stolen from other writers". Her mother was a housewife and her father worked on oil refineries. She was a "completely tomboyish child", but as a teenager discovered she "could enjoy femininity, makeup and clothes, the whole thing. I really got into it, it was great fun." Although she always had the sense that she was bisexual, she was "completely into boys", even if those she was attracted to tended to be a little camp. It wasn't until she went to university that she fell in love with another woman. "It was more interesting for me than worrying. The main thing was that it was fantastically exciting because I was in love." Although they stayed together for the next six years, it took a couple of years for them both to come out to their parents, who "didn't jump for joy, but were supportive. Their main priority was that I was happy."

She now lives in a top-floor Victorian flat in Kennington, south-east London, and Lucy lives in a garden flat round the corner with their three cats, to whom she is a "part-time parent" at weekends. She works five days a week and very occasionally gives herself the day or the afternoon off, "if I've been very good". She says she is "completely devoted to Lucy", and although civil partnerships "are brilliant for them that want it", they don't. Perhaps if they have children it will be a different matter, she says. Will they? "I doubt it. It's not something I'm terribly interested in."

Her next novel, for which she already has a story, will be a return to the postwar period, most probably the 1950s. But, she says quietly, it might not be lesbian. "It's a bit scary, as all my lesbian readers will hate me. But I think I will probably always have a sort of lesbian aesthetic - whatever that means."

Waters is often asked if she will ever write a contemporary lesbian novel. "God, I live in a contemporary lesbian world. It's the last thing I'd want to write about. It really is. It's precisely the difference of the past that makes it excit- ing for me. I think we always need to be reminded that the moment that we live in is very temporary. Historical fiction at its best can remind us of that".